Try http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2000150380%204025&name=%2425%20-%20%2450

$45 is the floor price for retail at present.

My basic reasoning is this:

Reduce the cost of the base model substantially, targeting a $150-$250 cost bracket initially with the ability to reduce the cost quickly to a low baseline. As a pure gaming machine, I believe it is far cheaper if they can make the console simpler with less reliance on mechanical parts. So take the Arcade SKU and use that model as a baseline to build up the larger SKUs as well.

Moving towards an online distribution model, it makes even less sense to include an optical drive in the consoles. However with flash based media they can retain the ability to distribute games through retail far cheaper and they don't have the dead weight of a drive they intend to discard for the most part anyway.

If you need to apply patches to a game, you need some form of storage. But with flash based media, you could patch the media itself rather than needing to store the information on the hard disk. That increases the viability of a basic Arcade - like SKU. With a few hundred megabytes of space available it will let them play online games, maybe even games like MMOs which previously required hard-drives.

So yes, the thread is about the media. The media is a means to reduce the consoles from to purely solid state devices, not relying on mechanical parts which are prone to breaking down eventually.

And i'm all for that, i love flash drives and Memory Cards, i don't use the UMD slot on my PSP because i dump the UMD data on my Memory Card to have a real handheld gaming experience, my computer has a SSD for both OSs, while the virtual memory/swap file and apps/data are handled in HDDs (SSDs still have a rewrite limitation)... I picked my latest DVD player with a USB drive (That was before the PS3 so i don't use it as often now), i was one of the first ones in my circle to have a flash MP3 player (everyone had either CD players or Classic iPods that have HDDs), etc.

I get your point, i even imagine how the SKUs can be distributed:

SKU 1 - Media: Flash Drive for Games, Internal Memory: 4 GB. 1 Multi Card Reader and USB slots

SKU 2 - Media: Flash Drive for Games/Optical for Movies, Internal Memory: 8 GB. 1 Multi Card Reader and USB slots

SKU 3 - Media: Flash Drive for Games/Optical for Other stuff (Movies, OS Apps, anything but games), SSD: 150 GB. 1 Multi Card Reader and USB slots

SKU 4 and up have simply more SSD space

The problem is, i don't see any of the 3 companies changing to that now or the next gen, mainly because 3rd party support, but the option is really viable for the gen after that...

I'm 100% in favour of using flash memory, or similar for the next generation
By the 2011-2012 you will be able to buy a 16GB card for around US$5 retail, which has retailer markup, distributor markup, shipping costs, etc. Manufacturing cost would be a couple of dollars easy.

Not only do you get the massive performance increase, but cartridges are far more durable, plus you can get different sized carts for the appropriate sized game. Cheap small budget titles can get away with 4-8GB memory carts, average around 16GB moving up to 32GB for your massive big budget titles. By the end of the gen maybe 64GB would be cost effective.

I'd be happy to pay an extra $5 for a game if it came on a cartridge anyway. Chances are it'd make the console far cheaper to make and you could use that saving to balance out the added game costs.

You're assuming too much. Why does it have to be a laptop sizes hardrive?. Why does it have to be 80GB, and even so, that $45 is not what sony/microsoft/nintendo would pay.

From what I understand, HDDs have a certain "overhead" cost which can't be reduced all that far. The cost of producing a drive generally only changes with the cost of the platter. You still need a controller, casing, motor, etc... all of which are a fixed cost per drive.

This is one of the reasons that MS now has a 60gb drive instead of a 20gb drive in the 360. The cost to produce a 20gb drive, especially in small amounts, is possibly more expensive than producing a 60gb drive.

I thought Squilliam's OP was troll flamebait, but then he discussed the topic seriously, but it seems he's bouncing around from topic to topic and not making a lot of sense.

Strange...